Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a question I originally asked on May 8 in regard to comments the Minister of National Defence made on April 18, when he was in India. He gave a speech and embellished the facts when he said, “On my first deployment to Kandahar in 2006...I [was] the architect of...Operation Medusa, where we removed 1,500 fighters, Taliban fighters, off the battlefield”. On May 8, I asked if the minister could honestly explain whether he has any integrity left.
It comes back to the National Defence code of ethics he was bound by, not only as the Minister of National Defence but as a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces. It says that “being a person of integrity calls for honesty, [and] the avoidance of deception”. It requires the “pursuit of truth regardless of personal consequences”.
If we look at the minister's behaviour, I know he apologized for his comments. He has made it more than once. It also appeared in a video in 2015, and I believe he understands the consequences of his actions, but it also brings into question all the other things that have changed under his direction as Minister of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces, because there is a real lack of transparency.
The Conservatives used to provide all sorts of briefings and updates and explained to Canadians what our armed forces were doing in things like Operation Impact, and now we never get any briefings on what our troops are doing in the battle against ISIS in Iraq or in Syria. We know there have been changes, because the media have reported on them, but there have not been briefings offered to us as parliamentarians. There have not been technical briefings offered to reporters and Canadians in general to find out exactly where our troops are off to.
The rules of engagement have actually just changed again in the last few weeks. We now know that our special operations forces have expanded what they are doing in dealing with unexploded ordinances and going out and assisting the peshmerga as well as Iraqi security forces in taking the offensive in the last few holds ISIS still has.
If we go beyond that and look at what the Prime Minister's code of ethics states, it says that ministers must act with honesty. We are going through this whole process where the Minister of Finance has been caught and has not been practising the code the Prime Minister laid out to make sure that they are honest. According to the code of ethics, parliamentary secretaries and ministers of the crown are given 60 days to respond to the issue of making sure they put all their assets out there. He did not talk about his villa for two years, not 60 days. He did not put his assets into a blind trust, which everyone else had to. I put my farm in a blind trust when I was parliamentary secretary.
I want to come back to how the minister has not been honest in how he has dealt with the replacement of our CF-18s. The minister has made a circus of the replacement of our fleet of fighter jets here in Canada, and that goes from when the Prime Minister first said he would not buy the F-35 because he did not think it worked. Then the Liberals invented an imaginary capability gap, despite what we heard from all sorts of experts and former commanders of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Then they were going to sole source Super Hornets but then were in a fight between Bombardier and Boeing, and the circus continues. Now they are not going to buy the Super Hornets but are going to buy used, worn out fighter jets from Australia. It is a circus. There is no integrity. We ask for some clarity, transparency, and integrity from the Minister of National Defence.